Chapter 4

I have heard it said that Antwerp was indifferent to its fate, but it made no such impression on me. Never have I lived in such an atmosphere of gloom and depression. Except around the St. Antoine at the lunch and dinner-hours and in the cafes just before nightfall did one see anything which was even a second cousin to jollity. The people did not smile. They went about with grave and anxious faces. In fact, outside of the places I have mentioned, one rarely heard a laugh. The people who sat at the round iron tables on the sidewalks in front of the cafes drinking their light wines and beer --no spirits were permitted to be sold--sat in silence and with solemn faces. God knows, there was little enough for them to smile about. Their nation was being slowly strangled. Three-quarters of its soil was under the heel of the invader. An alien flag, a hated flag, flew over their capital. Their King and their Government were fugitives, moving from place to place as a vagrant moves on at the approach of a policeman. Men who, a month before, were prosperous shopkeepers and tradesmen were virtual bankrupts, not knowing where the next hundred-franc note was coming from. Other men had seen their little flower-surrounded homes in the suburbs razed to the ground that an approaching enemy might find no cover. Though the shops were open, they had no customers for the people had no money, or, if they had money they were hoarding it against the days when they might be homeless fugitives. No, there was not very much to smile about in Antwerp.

There were amusing incidents, of course. If one recognizes humour when he sees it he can find it in almost any situation. After the first Zeppelin attack the management of the St. Antoine fitted up bedrooms in the cellars.

A century or more ago the St. Antoine was not a hotel but a monastery, and its cellars are all that the cellars of a monastery ought to be--thick-walled and damp and musty. Yet these subterranean suites were in as great demand among the diplomatists as are tables in the palm-room of the Savoy during the season. From my bedroom window, which overlooked the court, I could see apprehensive guests cautiously emerging from their cellar chambers in the early morning. It reminded me of woodchucks coming out of their holes.

As the siege progressed and the German guns were pushed nearer to the city, those who lived in what might be termed "conspicuous" localities began to seek other quarters.

"I'm going to change hotels to-day," I heard a man remark to a friend.

"Why?" inquired the other.

"Because I am within thirty yards of the cathedral," was the answer. The towering spire of the famous cathedral is, you must understand, the most conspicuous thing in Antwerp--on clear days you can see it from twenty miles away--and to live in its immediate vicinity during a bombardment of the city was equivalent to taking shelter under the only tree in a field during a heavy thunderstorm.

Two days before the bombardment began there was a meeting of the American residents--such of them as still remained in the city--at the leading club. About a dozen of us in all sat down to dinner. The purpose of the gathering was to discuss the attitude which the Americans should adopt towards the German officers, for it was known that the fall of the city was imminent. I remember that the sense of the meeting was that we should treat the helmeted intruders with frigid politeness--I think that was the term--which, translated, meant that we were not to offer them cigars and buy them drinks. Of the twelve of us who sat around the table that night, there are only two--Mr. Manly Whedbee and myself--who remained to witness the German occupation.

That the precautions taken against Zeppelins were by no means overdone was proved by the total failure of the second aerial raid on Antwerp, in the latter part of September, when a dirigible again sailed over the city under cover of darkness. Owing to the total absence of street-lights, however, the dirigible's crew were evidently unable to get their bearings, for the half-dozen bombs that they discharged fell in the outskirts of the city without causing any loss of life or doing any serious damage. This time, moreover, the Belgians were quite prepared--the fire of their "sky artillery," guided by searchlights, making things exceedingly uncomfortable for the Germans.

I have heard it stated by Belgian officers and others that the bombs were dropped from the dirigibles by an ingenious arrangement which made the airship itself comparatively safe from harm and at the same time rendered the aim of its bombmen much more accurate. According to them, the dirigible comes to a stop--or as near a stop as possible--above the city or fortification which it wishes to attack, at a height out of range of either artillery or rifle-fire. Then, by means of a steel cable a thousand feet or more in length, it lowers a small wire cage just large enough to contain a man and a supply of bombs, this cage being sufficiently armoured so that it is proof against rifle-bullets. At the same time it affords so tiny a mark that the chances of its being hit by artillery-fire are insignificant. If it should be struck, moreover, the airship itself would still be unharmed and only one man would be lost, and when he fell his supply of bombs would fall with him. The Zeppelin, presumably equipped with at least two cages and cables, might at once lower another bomb-thrower. I do not pretend to say whether this ingenious contrivance is used by the Germans. Certainly the Zeppelin which I saw in action had nothing of the kind, nor did it drop its projectiles promiscuously, as one would drop a stone, but apparently discharged them from a bomb-tube.

Though the Zeppelin raids proved wholly ineffective, so far as their effect on troops and fortifications were concerned, the German aviators introduced some novel tricks in aerial warfare which were as practical as they were ingenious. During the battle of Vilvorde, for example, and throughout the attacks on the Antwerp forts, German dirigibles hovered at a safe height over the Belgian positions and directed the fire of the German gunners with remarkable success. The aerial observers watched, through powerful glasses, the effect of the German shells and then, by means of a large disc which was swung at the end of a line and could be raised or lowered at will, signalled as need be in code "higher--lower--right--left" and thus guided the gunners--who were, of course, unable to see their mark or the effect of their fire--until almost every shot was a hit. At Vilvorde, as a result of this aerial fire-control system, I saw the German artillery, posted out of sight behind a railway embankment, get the range of a retreating column of Belgian infantry and with a dozen well-placed shots practically wipe it out of existence. So perfect was the German system of observation and fire control during the final attack on the Antwerp defences that whenever the Belgians or British moved a regiment or a battery the aerial observers instantly detected it and a perfect storm of shells was directed against the new position.

Throughout the operations around Antwerp, the Taubes, as the German aeroplanes are called because of their fancied resemblance to a dove, repeatedly performed daring feats of reconnaissance. On one occasion, while I was with the General Staff at Lierre, one of these German Taubes sailed directly over the Hotel de Ville, which was being used as staff headquarters. It so happened that King Albert was standing in the street, smoking one of the seven-for-a-franc Belgian cigars to which he was partial.

"The Germans call it a dove, eh?" remarked the King, as he looked up at the passing aircraft. "Well, it looks to me more like a hawk."

A few days before the fall of Antwerp a Taube flew over the city in the early afternoon, dropping thousands of proclamations printed in both French and Flemish and signed by the commander of the investing forces, pointing out to the inhabitants the futility of resistance, asserting that in fighting Germany they were playing Russia's game, and urging them to lay down their arms. The aeroplane was greeted by a storm of shrapnel from the high-angle guns mounted on the fortifications, the only effect of which, however, was to kill two unoffending citizens who were standing in the streets and were struck by the fragments of the falling shells.

Most people seem to have the impression that it is as easy for an aviator to see what is happening on the ground beneath him as though he were looking down from the roof of a high building. Under ordinary conditions, when one can skim above the surface of the earth at a height of a few hundred feet, this is quite true, but it is quite a different matter when one is flying above hostile troops who are blazing away at him with rifles and machine-guns. During reconnaissance work the airmen generally are compelled to ascend to an altitude of a mile or a mile and a quarter, which makes observation extremely difficult, as small objects, even with the aid of the strongest glasses, assume unfamiliar shapes and become fore- shortened. If, in order to obtain a better view, they venture to fly at a lower height, they are likely to be greeted by a hail of rifle fire from soldiers in the trenches. The Belgian aviators with whom I talked assured me that they feared rifle fire more than bursting shrapnel, as the fire of a regiment, when concentrated even on so elusive an object as an aeroplane, proves far more deadly than shells.

The Belgians made more use than any other nation of motor-cars. When war was declared one of the first steps taken by the military authorities was to commandeer every motor-car, every motor-cycle and every litre of petrol in the kingdom. As a result they depended almost entirely upon motor-driven vehicles for their military transport, which was, I might add, extremely efficient. In fact, we could always tell when we were approaching the front by the amazing number of motor-cars which lined the roads for miles in the rear of each division.

Anything that had four wheels and a motor to drive them--diminutive American run-abouts, slim, low-hung racing cars, luxurious limousines with coronets painted on the panels, delivery-cars bearing the names of shops in Antwerp and Ghent and Brussels, lumbering motor-trucks, hotel omnibuses--all met the same fate, which consisted in being daubed with elephant-grey paint, labelled "S.M." (Service Militaire) in staring white letters, and started for the front, usually in charge of a wholly inexperienced driver. It made an automobile lover groan to see the way some of those cars were treated. But they did the business. They averaged something like twelve miles an hour--which is remarkable time for army transport-- and, strangely enough, very few of them broke down. If they did there was always an automobile des reparations promptly on hand to repair the damage. Before the war began the Belgian army had no army transport worthy of the name; before the forts at Liege had been silenced it had as efficient a one as any nation in Europe.

The headquarters of the motor-car branch of the army was at the Pare des Automobiles Militaires, on the Red Star quays in Antwerp. Here several hundred cars were always kept in reserve, and here was collected an enormous store of automobile supplies and sundries. The scene under the long, low sheds, with their corrugated-iron roofs, always reminded me of the Automobile Show at Olympia. After a car had once been placed at your disposal by the Government, getting supplies for it was merely a question of signing bons. Obtaining extra equipment for my car was Roos' chief amusement. Tyres, tools, spare parts, horns, lamps, trunks--all you had to do was to scrawl your name at the foot of a printed form and they were promptly handed over. When I first went to Belgium I was given a sixty horse-power touring car, and when the weather turned unpleasant I asked for and was given a limousine that was big enough to sleep in, and when I found this too clumsy, the commandant of the Parc des Automobiles obligingly exchanged it for a ninety horse-power berline. They were most accommodating, those Belgians. I am sorry to say that my berline, which was the envy of every one in Antwerp, was eventually captured by the Germans.

Though both the French and the Germans had for a number of years been experimenting with armoured cars of various patterns, the Belgians, who had never before given the subject serious consideration, were the first to evolve and to send into action a really practical vehicle of this description. The earlier armoured cars used by the Belgians were built at the great Minerva factory in Antwerp and consisted of a circular turret, high enough so that only the head and shoulders of the man operating the machine-gun were exposed, covered with half-inch steel plates and mounted on an ordinary chassis. After the disastrous affair near Herenthals, in which Prince Henri de Ligne was mortally wounded while engaged in a raid into the German lines for the purpose of blowing up bridges, it was seen that the crew of the auto-mitrailleuses, as the armoured cars were called, was insufficiently protected, and, to remedy this, a movable steel dome, with an opening for the muzzle of the machine-gun, was superimposed on the turret. These grim vehicles, which jeered at bullets, and were proof even against shrapnel, quickly became a nightmare to the Germans. Driven by the most reckless racing drivers in Belgium, manned by crews of dare-devil youngsters, and armed with machine-guns which poured out lead at the rate of a thousand shots a minute, these wheeled fortresses would tear at will into the German lines, cut up an outpost or wipe out a cavalry patrol, dynamite a bridge or a tunnel or a culvert, and be back in the Belgian lines again almost before the enemy realized what had happened.

I witnessed an example of the cool daring of these mitrailleuse drivers during the fighting around Malines. Standing on a railway embankment, I was watching the withdrawal under heavy fire of the last Belgian troops, when an armoured car, the lean muzzle of its machine-gun peering from its turret, tore past me at fifty miles an hour, spitting a murderous spray of lead as it bore down on the advancing Germans. But when within a few hundred yards of the German line the car slackened speed and stopped. Its petrol was exhausted. Instantly one of the crew was out in the road and, under cover of the fire from the machine-gun, began to refill the tank. Though bullets were kicking up spurts of dust in the road or ping-pinging against the steel turret he would not be hurried. I, who was watching the scene through my field-glasses, was much more excited than he was. Then, when the tank was filled, the car refused to back! It was a big machine and the narrow road was bordered on either side by deep ditches, but by a miracle the driver was able-- and just able--to turn the car round. Though by this time the German gunners had the range and shrapnel was bursting all about him, he was as cool as though he were turning a limousine in the width of Piccadilly. As the car straightened out for its retreat, the Belgians gave the Germans a jeering screech from their horn, and a parting blast of lead from their machine-gun and went racing Antwerpwards.

It is, by the way, a curious and interesting fact that the machine-gun used in both the Belgian and Russian armoured cars, and which is one of the most effective weapons produced by the war, was repeatedly offered to the American War Department by its inventor, Major Isaac Newton Lewis, of the United States army, and was as repeatedly rejected by the officials at Washington. At last, in despair of receiving recognition in his own country, he sold it to Russia and Belgium. The Lewis gun, which is air-cooled and weighs only twenty-nine pounds--less than half the weight of a soldier's equipment--fires a thousand shots a minute. In the fighting around Sempst I saw trees as large round as a man's thigh literally cut down by the stream of lead from these weapons.

The inventor of the Lewis gun was not the only American who played an inconspicuous but none the less important part in the War of Nations. A certain American corporation doing business in Belgium placed its huge Antwerp plant and the services of its corps of skilled engineers at the service of the Government, though I might add that this fact was kept carefully concealed, being known to only a handful of the higher Belgian officials. This concern made shells and other ammunition for the Belgian army; it furnished aeroplanes and machine-guns; it constructed miles of barbed-wire entanglements and connected those entanglements with the city lighting system; one of its officers went on a secret mission to England and brought back with him a supply of cordite, not to mention six large-calibre guns which he smuggled through Dutch territorial waters hidden in the steamer's coal bunkers. And, as though all this were not enough, the Belgian Government confided to this foreign corporation the minting of the national currency. For obvious reasons I am not at liberty to mention the name of this concern, though it is known to practically every person in the United States, each month cheques being sent to the parent concern by eight hundred thousand people in New York alone.

Incidentally it publishes the most widely read volume in the world. I wish that I might tell you the name of this concern. Upon second thought, I think I will. It is the American Bell Telephone Company.

IV. Under The German Eagle

When, upon the approach of the Germans to Brussels, the Government and the members of the Diplomatic Corps fled to Antwerp, the American Minister, Mr. Brand Whitlock, did not accompany them. In view of the peculiar position occupied by the United States as the only Great Power not involved in hostilities, he felt, and, as it proved, quite rightly, that he could be of more service to Belgium and to Brussels and to the cause of humanity in general by remaining behind. There remained with him the secretary of legation, Mr. Hugh S. Gibson. Mr. Whitlock's reasons for remaining in Brussels were twofold. In the first place, there were a large number of English and Americans, both residents and tourists, who had been either unable or unwilling to leave the city, and who, he felt, were entitled to diplomatic protection. Secondly, the behaviour of the German troops in other Belgian cities had aroused grave fears of what would happen when they entered Brussels, and it was generally felt that the presence of the American Minister might deter them from committing the excesses and outrages which up to that time had characterized their advance. It was no secret that Germany was desperately anxious to curry favour with the United States, and it was scarcely likely, therefore, that houses would be sacked and burnt, civilians executed and women violated under the disapproving eyes of the American representative. This surmise proved to be well founded. The Germans did not want Mr. Whitlock in Brussels, and nothing would have pleased them better than to have had him depart and leave them to their own devices, but, so long as he blandly ignored their hints that his room was preferable to his company and persisted in sitting tight, they submitted to his surveillance with the best grace possible and behaved themselves as punctiliously as a dog that has been permitted to come into a parlour. After the civil administration had been established, however, and Belgium had become, in theory at least, a German province, Mr. Whitlock was told quite plainly that the kingdom to which he was accredited had ceased to exist as an independent nation, and that Anglo-American affairs in Belgium could henceforward be entrusted to the American Ambassador at Berlin. But Mr. .Whitlock, who had received his training in shirt-sleeve diplomacy as Socialist Mayor of Toledo, Ohio, was as impervious to German suggestions as he had been to the threats and pleadings of party politicians, and told Baron von der Golz, the German Governor, politely but quite firmly, that he did not take his orders from Berlin but from Washington. "Gott in Himmel!" exclaimed the Germans, shrugging their shoulders despairingly, "what is to be done with such a man?"

Before the Germans had been in occupation of Brussels a fortnight the question of food for the poorer classes became a serious and pressing problem. The German armies, in their onset toward the west, had swept the Belgian country-side bare; the products of the farms and gardens in the immediate vicinity of the city had been commandeered for the use of the garrison, and the spectre of starvation was already beginning to cast its dread shadow over Brussels. Mr. Whitlock acted with promptness and decision. He sent Americans, who had volunteered their services, to Holland to purchase food-stuffs, and at the same time informed the German commander that he expected these food-stuffs to be admitted without hindrance. The German replied that he could not comply with this request without first communicating with his Imperial master, whereupon he was told, in effect, that the American Government would consider him personally responsible if the food-stuffs were delayed or diverted for military use and a famine ensued in consequence. The firmness of Mr. Whitlock's attitude had its effect, for at seven o'clock the next morning he received word that his wishes would be complied with. As a result of the German occupation, Brussels, with its six hundred thousand inhabitants, was as completely cut off from communication with the outside world as though it were on an island in the South Pacific. The postal, telegraph and telephone services were suspended; the railways were blocked with troop trains moving westward; the roads were filled from ditch to ditch with troops and transport wagons; and so tightly were the lines drawn between that portion of Belgium occupied by the Germans and that still held by the Belgians, that those daring souls who attempted to slip through the cordons of sentries did so at peril of their lives. It sounds almost incredible that a great city could be so effectually isolated, yet so it was. Even the Cabinet Ministers and other officials who had accompanied the Government in its flight to Antwerp were unable to learn what had befallen the families which they had in many cases left behind them.

After nearly three weeks had passed without word from the American Legation, the Department of State cabled the American Consul-General at Antwerp that some means of communicating with Mr. Whitlock must be found. Happening to be in the Consulate when the message was received, I placed my services and my car at the disposal of the Consul-General, who promptly accepted them. Upon learning of my proposed jaunt into the enemy's lines, a friend, Mr. M. Manly Whedbee, the director of the Belgian branch of the British-American Tobacco Company, offered to accompany me, and as he is as cool-headed and courageous and companionable as anyone I know, and as he knew as much about driving the car as I did--for it was obviously impossible to take my Belgian driver--I was only too glad to have him with me. It was, indeed, due to Mr. Whedbee's foresight in taking along a huge quantity of cigarettes for distribution among the soldiers, that we were able to escape from Brussels. But more of that episode hereafter.